IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT:GNR Special Coverage: Climate Week 2014 --- the People's Climate March (largest in history), the protests on Wall Street (can ya hear us now?), and the special United Nations Climate Summit (every country on board)... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

The demonstration, called Flood Wall Street, drew hundreds of protesters, and came a day after a bigger action that brought 310,000 people to the streets of New York in what activists described as the largest protest ever against climate change.

Kerry used the speech to announce a US plan to fund a new World Bank program to decrease methane. NYC Climate Week aims to raise awareness over carbon emissions and their link to global warming ahead of a United Nations Climate Summit on Tuesday/

The most significant of the Obama administration’s new environmental policies is an executive order requiring that federal agencies factor in environmental sustainability when they design new international development programs.

[T]he event was a testament to the incredible urgency of climate change. A majority of the world’s heads of state took the time to address the conference even though no treaties or agreements were being negotiated there. The individual speeches may have been dull or meandering, but the collective message of the summit was sharp and clear: Climate change is already affecting countries all over the world, and developing countries are especially vulnerable.
...“I have always been infuriated by the shrinking ice caps on the peaks of Mount Kilimanjaro,” said Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. “By 1906, 16 [peaks] had ice caps on top. Today only three have ice caps … [It is] an assault on the cultural heritage of the people of tropical Africa, and an assault also on the handiwork of God.”

A United Nations chief dismayed at the lack of resolve toward the climate crisis; a daunting deadline for negotiating a new treaty; 125 or so heads of state; a sprawling agenda of fossil fuels, food, forestry and finance; a train of think tanks hauling gigabytes of green data; countless teach-ins, press conferences, art shows—plus tens or even hundreds of thousands of activists marching through midtown Manhattan, demanding action now.

John D. Rockefeller built a vast fortune on oil. Now his heirs are abandoning fossil fuels. The family whose legendary wealth flowed from Standard Oil is planning to announce on Monday that its $860 million philanthropic organization, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, is joining the divestment movement that began a couple years ago on college campuses.

'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (Stuff we didn't have time for in today's audio report)...

or those and many other reasons, the march was awesome, a real triumph for the movement, despite what all the ankle-biters have said. Having gotten that out of the way, I’ll now resume saying depressing sh*t.

The march slogan was, “to change everything, we need everyone,” which is telling, because it won’t change everything, because it didn’t include everyone. Specifically, it won’t change American politics because it didn’t include conservatives.

Both of these records, NOAA says, were driven in large part by unusually warm ocean temperatures around the world. In fact, global average ocean temperatures were so high in August - 1.17 degrees Fahrenheit above average, to be exact - that they broke the all-time record set just two months ago....The fact that the planet is so warm without an El Niño around to boost temperatures is a sign that global warming has become so noticeable that an El Niño event is no longer needed to set all-time records like this.

But exactly how bad is still an open question, and a lot depends not only on how we react, but how quickly. The rate at which humans cut down on greenhouse gas emissions--if we do choose to cut them--will have a large bearing on how the world turns out by 2100, the forecasts reveal.

Restraining global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius will require changing how the world produces and uses energy to power its cities and factories, heats and cools buildings, as well as moves people and goods in airplanes, trains, cars, ships and trucks, according to the IPCC. Changes are required not just in technology, but also in people's behavior.